Customs cops battle smuggling at L.A./Long Beach port

The arm on a massive, truck-mounted x-ray scanner reaches up and over shipping containers during an inspection at the Port of Long Beach. JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Officer Randy Rosales, with the United States Customs and Border Protection, inspects a shipment of clothing and accessories that was singled out for secondary screening at a nondescript warehouse near the Port of Long Beach Thursday. He found a variety of name brand and generic products. JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Counterfeit goods ranging from air soft guns to bottles of toothpaste, sunglasses, lip balm and electronic toys sit in a display room at a non-descript United States Customs and Border Protection warehouse. JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Sergio Espinoza, Assistant Port Director with United States Customs and Border Protection, right, observes the transfer of shipping containers from ship to truck-bed at the Port of Long Beach Thursday. JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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A ship offloads its cargo at the Port of Long Beach recently. JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Officers with United States Customs and Border Protection use a massive truck-mounted x-ray unit to do a spot inspection of containers as they're offloaded from a ship at the Port of Long Beach. JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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The arm on a massive, truck-mounted x-ray scanner reaches up and over shipping containers during an inspection at the Port of Long Beach. JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Officer Arthur Rangsitpol with United States Customs and Border Protection guides the driver of a truck-mounted x-ray machine as it examines the contents of a shipping container at the Port of Long Beach. JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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A United States Customs and Border Protection officer uses a handheld radiation scanner during an unload inspection of containers at the Port of Long Beach. JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Trucks with freshly offloaded shipping containers pass through radiation detectors at the Port of Long Beach recently. Every truck has to pass through the scanners before leaving the port. JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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A truck passes through a secondary radiation scanner after its contents triggered an alarm at the Port of Long Beach on Dec. 1. Officials with United States Customs and Border Protection say this is a common occurrence - sometimes as many as 300 times a day. More often than not, ceramic products are the culprit, but officers inspect every alarm. JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Officers with United States Customs and Border Protection inspect the contents of a container that triggered a radiation warning on its way away from the Port of Long Beach Thursday. The container's manifest suggested that it held a range of kitchenware. Officers presumed that the contents were likely ceramic, which routinely triggers radiation warnings. Investigators found a variety of products ranging from metallic jewelry boxes to linens, but no kitchenware in the first few boxes. So, the container was rerouted from delivery to full inspection at a local Customs and Border Protection warehouse. JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Officers with United States Customs and Border Protection inspect the contents of a container that triggered a radiation warning on its way away from the Port of Long Beach Thursday. The container's manifest suggested that it held a range of kitchenware. Officers presumed that the contents were likely ceramic, which routinely triggers radiation warnings. Investigators found a variety of products ranging from metallic jewelry boxes to linens, but no kitchenware in the first few boxes. So, the container was rerouted from delivery to full inspection at a local Customs and Border Protection warehouse. JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Officers with United States Customs and Border Protection inspect the contents of a container that triggered a radiation warning on its way away from the Port of Long Beach on Dec. 1. The container's manifest suggested that it held a range of kitchenware. Officers presumed that the contents were likely ceramic, which routinely triggers radiation warnings. Investigators found a variety of products ranging from metallic jewelry boxes to linens, but no kitchenware in the first few boxes. So, the container was rerouted from delivery to full inspection at a local Customs and Border Protection warehouse. JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Officers with United States Customs and Border Protection say that battling the importers of counterfeit goods requires vigilance and careful inspection. This black jacket might look like a pretty generic item - not worth much... JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Removing the Brooklyn, New York logo reveals the coat's true nature. It's a counterfeit North Face jacket. JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Counterfeiters had hoped officers with United States Customs and Border Protection would accept these generic sneakers at face value... JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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A closer look revealed that the shoes were actually counterfeit Spiderman sneakers. JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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An eagle-eyed officer was reviewing a shipping manifest that suggested a container was filled with purses. The officer thought the purses looked a little "junky." When the officer opened one of the purses they noticed that it contained a counterfeit Louis Vuitton purse -- as did the rest of the shipment. JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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These Rolex watches look pretty passable until you note that the second hand ticks rather than rotates in one continuous movement - counterfeits. JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Counterfeit Affliction and True Religion jeans almost made it to market with generic tags covering the counterfeit name brand logos. JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

They look like legitimate Marlboro boxes and they are. Officers found the empty boxes with a shipment of off-brand cigarettes that, presumably, scammers intended to load into the name-brand cartons. JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Bootlegged DVD movies. JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Those are no more real Duracell batteries than that mascot is the Energizer Bunny. JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Officers with United States Customs and Border Protection say they intercept a lot of drug paraphernalia. This haul turned-up "Simpsons" and "South Park" cartoon bongs. JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Officers with United States Customs and Border Protection say they see a lot of counterfeit shoes as they monitor imports through Long Beach. JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Counterfeit energy drinks and fragrances sit in a display room at a non-descript United States Customs and Border Protection warehouse. JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Counterfeit goods ranging from Disney character stamps to USC paper weights and toys sit in a display room at a non-descript United States Customs and Border Protection warehouse. JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Counterfeit cartoon character wallets sit in a display room at a non-descript United States Customs and Border Protection warehouse. JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Officer Randy Rosales, with the United States Customs and Border Protection, inspects a shipment of clothing and accessories that was singled out for secondary screening at a nondescript warehouse near the Port of Long Beach recently. He found a variety of name brand and generic products. JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Officers with United States Customs and Border Protection use a massive truck-mounted x-ray unit to do a spot inspection of containers as they're offloaded from a ship at the Port of Long Beach. JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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The arm on a massive, truck-mounted x-ray scanner reaches up and over shipping containers during an inspection at the Port of Long Beach. JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

1 of 36

A United States Customs and Border Protection officer uses a handheld radiation scanner during an unload inspection of containers at the Port of Long Beach. JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Trucks with freshly offloaded shipping containers pass through radiation detectors at the Port of Long Beach. Every truck has to pass through the scanners before leaving the port. JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

The arm on a massive, truck-mounted x-ray scanner reaches up and over shipping containers during an inspection at the Port of Long Beach. JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Fake goods: where they come from and types

LOS ANGELES/LONG BEACH SEAPORT – Inside a cavernous warehouse near this bustling hub of international commerce, where massive cargo ships and tall cranes scrape the sky, Randy Rosales flicks open his knife.

Wearing black gloves, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer glides the blade through the taped opening of a plain cardboard box.

The box is a puzzle — a tiny piece in a multi-billion-dollar war pitting a world of highly skilled, highly motivated smugglers against a much smaller army of customs officers armed with, among other things, pocket knives.

Supposedly, this box is filled with women's accessories from China. But it's part of a bigger shipment of handbags, wallets, hats and other items from an importer who used to send items through the port every month, yet, as Rosales sets to work, hasn't been sending stuff to the United States for eight months.

Such a lapse is a red flag. Along with sniffing out terrorists and terrorist weapons, customs officials are supposed to watch out for counterfeit goods. And importers who work at odd intervals sometimes deal in counterfeit goods.

So Rosales, using his knife, opens several of the importer's boxes.

Most of what he finds is generic stuff. But as he digs in he notices that a few of the importer's boxes are labeled as being filled with popular brands. The mix of generic and name brands is another red flag.

Rosales holds up a cream-colored sun hat sporting the label of a well-known women's retailer. Taking a closer look, he notices some sloppy stitching. Also, as he holds it, the hat feels flimsier than it should. And the price — $12.95 – is suspiciously low for a genuine item sold by this particular retailer.

As he starts to slash open several more boxes – only a fraction of the hundreds of boxes that have been unloaded from a 40-foot cargo container — Rosales offers an opinion:

"At this point, I'm thinking this may not be a legitimate shipment."

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In the relentless and seemingly one-sided fight to keep counterfeit goods from entering the country, Customs and Borders Protection officers rely on old-fashioned know-how combined with state-of-the-art screening technology.

They have low-tech knives to open boxes, and high-tech imaging devices to peek inside. They have experience and energy. They have intuition.

But, mostly, they have a numbers problem.

The LA/Long Beach port is the world's sixth busiest, with more than 5.1 million cargo containers passing through each year. Here, a container is offloaded from a ship every six seconds, and each container can hold enough stuff to fill a three-bedroom house. Of the nation's total cargo container traffic, 44 percent flows through Long Beach/Long Angeles.

In one sense, such a large-scale fight is simple. Carlos Martel, CBP director of the LA/Long Beach seaport, says that when searching for a needle in a haystack, as his people are, the smart thing to do is to shrink the haystack.

And that, he says, means targeting shipments from supposedly "high-risk" countries while making random checks on familiar, trusted importers. It's a balancing act: to ensure the free flow of trade, while also enforcing more than 140 federal laws and regulations to keep out the illegal stuff.

"We're the front lines," says Martel, 43, who oversees several hundred employees at the two ports.

"We're here to protect the American public."

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Since 9/11, millions of dollars in new technology has been invested to make the job of busting traffickers in fake goods easier. Orange County-based brands like Oakley, Wet Seal and Paul Frank now stand a better chance of protecting their trademarks, Martel says.

Over the last 10 years, seizures of goods that infringe on intellectual property rights – including trademarks and copyrights – have grown more than 400 percent both locally and nationally, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, parent agency of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

In the old days, CBP officers who roam the ports' 7,500 acres carried little more than a knife and firearm. They'd do that to inspect cargo coming in on ships so large that, in some cases, they can't squeeze through the Panama Canal.

Now, CBP officers have different tools – pagers to detect radiation, mobile X-ray machines, density meters and gadgets known as "vapor tracers." And the screening, Martel explains, often begins at the ships' point of origin, where some CBP officers and officials from partner agencies are stationed.

Martel, only two months into his job as port director, declines to divulge many specifics about enforcement strategy. But he says officers use a "layered" approach to sniff out and eventually seize counterfeit items.

The fight isn't totally about money. Many of the faux goods pose safety hazards to consumers. The CBP recently seized 151 life-size Santa Claus decorations, along with a snowman and a polar bear. The importer, from China, claimed that the decorations met U.S. certification standards – but they didn't.

One of the port officers studies an X-ray image of the contents of a container that the men are screening. The men work while sitting inside a slow-moving vehicle that hugs the container, kind of like a huge claw.

The X-ray can penetrate through a foot of steel to find stuff that looks suspicious, including false floor sections or compartments built into the sides of containers used to hide drugs, guns, money or other contraband.

(Money is often the illicit good being smuggled, and it's often found in seemingly innocuous items. Officers once found $500,000 stuffed into two rice cookers. And they found $40,000 tucked inside the pages of a magazine.)

Port officials call the X-ray machine a "nonintrusive inspection" device. Other nonintrusive devices include hand-held wands that officers scan along the outside of containers to detect unusual levels of radiation. Such radiation can be a sign of weapons though, more often, it's produced by such goods as ceramics, which can emit radiation naturally.

John Lesiczka, chief of the port's Anti-Terrorism Contraband Enforcement Team, says his officers typically X-ray 500 containers a day, sometimes by firing a beam out as far as 80 feet.

The two officers looking into the computer screen inspect cargo identified on shipping manifests as apparel from Indonesia and Bangladesh, and radiators for electrical transformers from India.

Everything looks good, so they move on to the next container.

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Homer is a bong.

The likeness of "The Simpsons" character is among hundreds of illegal items – in this case drug paraphernalia — seized by CBP officers. The items reside on shelves and tables, creating an unofficial Counterfeit Museum inside a warehouse near the port where containers often are taken for closer inspection.

CBP Chief Officer Guillermina Escobar, who leads the Merchandise Enforcement Team, points out a girl's bicycle seized in 2009. The pink bike met virtually no U.S. safety standards – with problems ranging from rust on the tubing and no reflectors to bad joint welds.

The bike came from an importer in China. That country is, by far, the biggest offender when it comes to trying to sneak sham goods into the United States. Last year, China was the country of origin for about 66 percent of all the items seized by CBP officials.

Escobar says that as long as consumers continue to buy suspiciously discounted "brand-name" items at swap meets, on the Internet and at other venues, the flow of illegal merchandise into the U.S. will continue.

"These items not only hurt the economy, but they also pose serious health and safety issues."

Still, the rewards for successful smugglers can be huge.

The CBP says markups on counterfeit name-brand goods sold in the United States range from 300 percent to more than 3,000 percent.

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CBP Officer Rosales checks with the importer of the so-called brand-name sun hats and other accessories to see if the shipment – from China – is legitimate.

He also checks with the trademark holder.

After a couple of days, he determines that the items are genuine.

Are the officers winning this war, or are the bad guys?

That's tough to say.

Last year nationally, CBP officers seized $1.5 billion worth of goods that violated trademark and copyright laws, but an accurate estimate of the total value of this illegal racket is difficult to come by, port officials say.

Typically, it takes two to three days for CBP officers to determine if items are bogus. As for prosecuting the bad guys, that's the job of a different agency: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Rosales says his job has made him something of a retail/brand name whiz – much to the amusement of his wife.

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